M.T. Anderson
The Projects heading suits a researcher rather than a novelist, so I have replaced it with Work. Note that the wiki's reading list has Feed as a separate entry, so this page links to it rather than duplicating the novel's summary.
M.T. Anderson
Biography
Matthew Tobin Anderson, born November 4, 1968, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, American author of fiction for young adults and children. He grew up in Stow, Massachusetts, took a degree in English literature from Harvard, and holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, where he later taught in the graduate writing program.
His work spans registers unusually widely, from picture books to satirical science fiction to a two-volume historical novel about the American Revolution. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature in 2006 and a Michael L. Printz Honor. Volume II, The Kingdom on the Waves, followed in 2008.
Work
Feed (2002)
Anderson's most cited book and the reason he appears on this wiki. See Feed for the full entry.
The premise is a near-future United States in which most people have a networked implant, the feed, installed in the brain, usually in infancy. It delivers advertising, entertainment, direct messaging, and shopping continuously, and it also handles a substantial share of what the characters would otherwise do with memory, arithmetic, and language.
Anderson wrote it before the smartphone and before social media as a consumer category. It was a National Book Award finalist in 2002 and received a Boston Globe-Horn Book Award.
Octavian Nothing (2006, 2008)
Two volumes narrated by an enslaved African boy raised in Revolutionary-era Boston as the subject of a scientific experiment intended to determine the intellectual capacity of his race. The prose is in eighteenth-century register, and the second volume follows Octavian into Lord Dunmore's Ethiopian Regiment.
Other work
Thirsty (1997), his first novel. Burger Wuss (1999). Landscape with Invisible Hand (2017), set after an alien economic occupation and adapted as a film in 2023. Symphony for the City of the Dead (2015), a nonfiction account of Shostakovich and the siege of Leningrad. He also writes the Pals in Peril series under the byline M.T. Anderson, and has published picture books including Me, All Alone, at the End of the World.
Relevance
Feed is the piece of fiction that most directly anticipates the condition this wiki documents. Anderson's implant is not a tool the characters use; it is the environment they think inside. The book's method is to demonstrate this through language rather than exposition, giving his narrator a vocabulary visibly reduced by never having needed one.
The novel also treats the body as the place where the consequences arrive. The lesions that appear on the characters' skin are commercially reframed as fashion, and the medical explanation is never separated from the marketing one, which makes it an unusually early treatment of the interface as something that acts on flesh.
Anderson's satire targets the economics rather than the technology. The feed is free, and the characters are the product, which was a common arrangement by the time most readers encountered the book and was not yet obvious in 2002.
Further Reading
- Feed
- Neuromancer
- Snow Crash
- Diamond Age (Book)
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
- Alone Together: Technology and the Reinvention of Intimacy and Solitude
- Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives
- Consuming Life
- Decoding Advertisements
- Sign Wars: The Cluttered Landscape of Advertising
- The System of Objects
- Simulacra and Simulation
- Keiichi Matsuda
- Anthropology Through Science Fiction
External Links
- M.T. Anderson, Wikipedia
- National Book Award citation, National Book Foundation
